Tin Drum, The (1979)
 |
Review #1,192 |
THE SCOOP
Director: Volker Schlondorff
Cast: David Bennent, Mario Adorf, Angela Winkler
Plot: Oskar Matzerath, son of a local dealer, is a most unusual boy. Equipped with full intellect right from his birth he decides at his third birthday not to grow up as he sees the crazy world around him at the eve of World War II.
Genre: Drama / War
Awards: Won Palme d'Or (Cannes).
Runtime: 162min (Director's Cut)
Rating: R21 for sexual scenes involving a young boy, nudity and violence.
International Sales: Tamasa Distribution
IN RETROSPECT (Spoilers: NO)
“The others are coming. They will occupy the fairgrounds, they will
stage torchlight parades, build rostrums, fill the rostrums, and from those
rostrums preach our destruction.”
The Tin Drum was famous for tying with Francis Ford
Coppola's Apocalypse Now for the
Cannes Palme d'Or in 1979. It was
however infamous for its controversy for having scenes of ‘child pornography’, leading
to censorship in many countries, including an outright ban in Canada. All that aside, the film is really and very
simply overrated, opting for a sweeping epic tale that does pay off in terms of
its scope and historicity, but fails (though not miserably) to nail the right
tone and focus for the film.
Directed
by Volker Schlondorff, The Tin Drum
is his badge of honour, the film that defined him as a filmmaker, and some
critics thought to be his masterpiece.
One of the least known of German New Wave filmmakers that included the
likes of Werner Herzog, R.W. Fassbinder and Wim Wenders, Schlondorff has made
films and television movies over five decades that are still not widely
available. For better or worse, The Tin Drum continues to be his
representative work, and not surprisingly given the full Criterion treatment.
It
is adapted from Gunter Grass' novel of the same name, with the author
contributing to some of the film's dialogue.
Charting the journey of a young boy whose physical growth is stunted,
the film sees the boy maturing (in his mind) while his body remains that of a
three-year old. He finds himself in a
world of adults whose capacity for oppression and authority depresses him
completely. He witnesses the rise of
Nazism on German soil and its inevitable fall, the suffering of the condemned,
as well as the joys of being part of a circus act involving dwarves.
Schlondorff
brings all the elements together to create a fable-like take on history, as
seen through the eyes of a young boy. It
is a bizarre work with a mix of powerful if surreal visuals that are imbued
with overbearing symbolism. Together
with the motif of the boy who (as the title suggests) frequently hits on his
beloved tin drum and attempting high-pitch screams that would shatter glass,
the film turns out to be rather hard to reconcile in literal terms.
Its
function as an allegory of one child's fight against authoritarianism is also
problematized because Schlondorff's film is unsure of its thematic underpinnings
– does it seek to portray, albeit surrealistically, a child's innocence
shattered by war (and sexuality), and hence earning our sympathy? Or does it want us to be agitated by a
child's (or brat really) agitation towards the idea of absolute power (and of
absolute sexual control)?
The
boy - his name is Oskar - played in an astounding performance by David Bennent
is quite rightly the film's anchor point despite the changing scenery and
circumstance. The cinematography and art
direction is top-tier, but at the end of the day, The Tin Drum, if it were to look at itself in the mirror, probably
wouldn't know what it is trying to say or evoke.
GRADE: B-
Tweet
Follow @Filmnomenon
Click here to go back to Central Station.
Comments